Council Meetings

Fedora Council Meeting

The Fedora Council holds weekly meetings. Every other week we have an Open Floor meeting, where the agenda is set by attendees at the beginning of the hour. On the other weeks, we alternate between Tickets and Ongoing meetings and video-based Subproject reports.

Council Meeting Process

This guide explains how to manage and run a Council IRC meeting. Many of the steps here could well apply to other groups that hold regular IRC meetings as well.

For a Tickets and Ongoing meeting

Tickets and Ongoing meetings happen every four weeks. They're held in the #fedora-meeting channel on Freenode. We don't want to be entirely ticket-driven (since that's a reactive process), but this helps keep important issues from slipping through the cracks.

Pre-meeting (Tickets and Ongoing)

1. Go through open tickets and select several that seem timely or otherwise worth real-time discussion.This is also a good time to poke forward any issues that don't really need to be at the meeting but need further action, or to close issues that are resolved — or which won't be resolved. We want to keep the open tickets reflective of actual work in progress, not merely things we hope to get to someday. (Ticket system or not, there's an infinite pool of potential work for the Council, and keeping open tickets which we have no practical plan to work on is a recipe for sadness all around.)

2. Consider other topics that might benefit from real-time discussion in order to move forward. Again, we don't want to block issues on waiting for "everyone in the room" conversations (when we have mailing lists and lazy consensus), but we've found that regular discussion is important.

3. Generate an email to the council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org list with the following template:

 
Schedule for Wednesday's Tickets and Ongoing Fedora Council Meeting (2024-04-24)

 
The Fedora Council will hold our regular Tickets and Ongoing meeting
at 14:00UTC in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome!

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UTCHowto

or run:
  date -d '2024-04-24 14:00 UTC'


Expected discussion items include:


YOUR AGENDA ITEMS HERE


If you would like to add something to this agenda, you can reply to
this email, e-mail me directly, file a new ticket at
https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issues, or if time permits,
bring it up at the end of the meeting, during the open floor topic.
Note that added topics may be deferred until the following meeting.

During the Meeting (Tickets and Ongoing)

You can copy and paste in lines from this template as the meeting proceeds. You may find it helpful to copy this to a file in advance, so you can pre-fill the topic lines.

 
#startmeeting Council (2024-04-24)
#meetingname council
#chair mattdm jkurik jwb langdon robyduck tatica bexelbie
#topic Introductions, Welcomes
#topic Today's Agenda
(paste agenda from previous email)
#topic first topic...
#topic next topic...
...
#topic Open Floor
#endmeeting

1. Use the lines up through 'Introductions, Welcomes' to start the meeting.

2. Wait for a majority of the Council to show up.

3 We've found that our meetings and discussions are small and informal enough that we don't need special etiquette markers (like ! to ask for permission to talk). If we ever do have a particularly contentious and popular topic, we may introduce rules like that temporarily — but, usually, it's just not necessary.

4. Keep an eye on the clock — if a topic is using more than the expected time, sometimes that's okay, and other times it's best to ask that discussion continue in tickets and on the mailing list and move on.

5. Make liberal use of Zodbot commands like #topic, #info, and #help, to populate the meeting minutes.

Post meeting (Tickets and Ongoing)

1. The meeting minutes are automatically collected in Møte and emailed to meetingminutes. It might be nice to find this and also mail it to the list. (Ideally, we'd enhance meetbot to automatically send these minutes to the appropriate list. #help, please!)

2. Process through tickets comment/close them as appropriate.

3. If you have any action items you can handle quickly, now is really a good time for it. Otherwise, don't forget to add these to your personal todo list.

For an Open Floor meeting

Open Floor meetings happen every other week. As with Tickets and Ongoing meetings, they are held in the #fedora-meeting channel on Freenode. They do not have a preset agenda. Instead, we spend the first few minutes of the meeting deciding what topics will be discussed. If attendees — Council members and otherwise — have several topics of general interest, the primary meeting chair (usually the FPL or FCAIC) will put them in order, and after a certain amount of time discussing the first, ask if it's time to move on.

Pre-meeting (Open Floor)

1. The beauty of this is that it requires very little pre-meeting work. Just generate an email to the council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org list with the following template:

{{#tag:pre| The Fedora Council will hold our regular Open Floor meeting at 14:00UTC in #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net. All are welcome!

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UTCHowto

or run:

 date -d '2024-04-24 14:00 UTC'

Our Open Floor meetings do not have a preset agenda. Instead, we spend the first few minutes of the meeting deciding what topics will be discussed. If attendees — Council members and otherwise — have several topics with general interest, I'll order them and after a certain amount of time discussing the first, ask if it's time to move on.

During the Meeting (Open Floor)

You can copy and paste in lines from this template as the meeting proceeds.

 
#startmeeting Council (2024-04-24)
#meetingname council
#chair mattdm jkurik jwb langdon robyduck tatica bexelbie
#topic Introductions, Welcomes
#topic Today's Open Floor Agenda
#topic (first topic decided on)...
#topic (next topic decided on)...
...
#endmeeting

1. Use the lines up to 'Introductions, Welcomes' to start the meeting.

2. Wait a few for people to show up.

3. Follow the Open Floor meeting procedure:

1. . Ask for topics
2. . Gauge popularity, sort topics
3. . Ask if everyone is okay with the sorted list
4. . Move to the first topic
5. . After ten minutes, or if discussion wanes, ask if people want to keep talking on the current topic or move on.
6. . Sometimes, a little encouragement to get to further topics is a good idea. :)

4. Make liberal use of Zodbot commands like #topic, #info, and #help, to populate the meeting minutes.

Post meeting (Open Floor)

1. The meeting minutes are automatically collected in Møte and emailed to meetingminutes. It might be nice to find this and also mail it to the list. (Ideally, we'd enhance meetbot to automatically send these minutes to the appropriate list. #help, please!)

2. Process through tickets comment/close them as appropriate.

3. If you have any action items you can handle quickly, now is really a good time for it. Otherwise, don't forget to add these to your personal todo list.

Subproject Reports

TBD: expand this section. These are currently done with Youtube Live. We'd love an entirely open source and unencumbered media solution, but it needs:

• to scale to at least ten active participants,
• and a bigger number of passive viewers,
• and to produce a video file we can use afterwards,
• ideally with minimum of fuss.